Make Sweet, Sweet Love to My House

Before Chris Harrison became host of The Bachelor, he was the host of HGTV's Designers' Challenge. But the road between dating shows and cable home shows runs both ways. TLC announced that Bob "Bachelor Bob" Guiney will host the new Date My House, in which prospective buyers follow a "speed dating" search of houses with a lengthier "date" in which they spend an extended time in the house.

This is not the first new home show to draw the analogy between the housing market and the dating market. And the analogy says something about how the U.S. housing market has changed, and with it, the market for home-show programming.

Basically, your house used to be able to play hard to get. Now it's got to put out.

At the beginning of the year, I blogged about the new HGTV show Sleep on It—which has a similar premise to Date My House—and in particular, the advertising for the show, which likened the home-buying process to Meat Loaf's Paradise By the Dashboard Light, in which a young lady tries to leverage a young man's desire for a little backseat nooky into a lifetime commitment.

The commercial was a little disturbing and a lot cheesy, but paired with Date My House, the connection between home buying and dating seems obvious. Both make addictive TV because the choice is so fraught, and because viewers have, in both areas, experienced tough decisions about whether to commit, and the anxiety as to whether they were about to make a decision that would be traumatic and expensive to undo. [Disclosure: Not a thinly-veiled cry for help. Tuned In Jr. and Tuned In Jr. Jr., Mommy and Daddy still love each other very much.]

And both shows are trying to roll with the changes in the sinking national housing market, which mean a much different power dynamic between buyers and sellers. During the boom, the numbers were stacked against the suitors—the buyers—who faced bidding wars for a few ever-more-expensive houses, while brokers worked them into terror about the possibility of ending up spinsters and bachelors (i.e., renters) forever.

The houses and their sellers, meanwhile, could afford to be as coy and withholding as Victorian maidens, showing the barest bit of ankle before pressuring their courters to ante up with little time to decide. The housing market operated as if by some Realtors' version of The Rules. You can't have the milk unless you buy the cow!

Now, with the subprime crisis fully in effect, foreclosures rising and prices dropping, the market is governed by a new book: Your Buyer Is Just Not That Into You. And houses and sellers now find themselves cast as the imperiled heroines of Edith Wharton novels, facing a life of loneliness and destitution should they fail to negotiate the hazards of romance and not make a suitable match.

What better way, then, to reimagine the housing market than as a dating game—an ever more competitive one for the houses, who must now stand en masse as a single entitled suitor decides lazily which one gets the next rose? And in this new cutthroat situation, what house is so fine as to think it can afford to refuse a night in the Fantasy Suite?